Those of you who have been drawing similarities between Dead Island and Left 4 Dead should stop making that list right after you reach “4-player co-op”. Even though both games feature zombies and the aforementioned co-operative gameplay, Dead Island seems geared more towards atmosphere and immersion rather than the pick-up-and-play style of Valve’s L4D series.

Techland has boasted that it will feature a cool drop in/drop out system, where players will be able to enter and exit their friends playing sessions and interact with their world without necessarily interacting with their friends directly. This adds to the realism that separates it from other zombie games on the market, and will allow each and every gamer to have a unique playing experience depending on who they decide to bring along with them for the ride.

if that's true then people won't need to be bunched up, and could in fact split up. MP could be very epic in this game. I think Blackjack needs to get it

Let us wait and see if our brethen tell us whether the game runs smoothly on OK systems. After Homefront (which barely runs on my system at all; the demo was not too bad but the full game my system just can't seem to handle), I need to do more of a wait-and-see on things.

Is this based on a licensed engine, or is it new from the ground up? Just curious about that.

You can certainly split up on an L4D or Killing Floor game if you want to (I've been on many a team that didn't seem interested in being around each other on a map), it just seems at odds with the co-op experience. Apparently this doesn't have friendly fire so bunching up shouldn't be too frustrating hopefully.

So how does Dead Island differ from other zombie titles, like Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil (can that even be considered a zombie game anymore)? Well, for one thing, Dead Island is not just about running around and shooting up the place. It’s about carefully choosing when to engage a horde of zombies.

You aren’t given an arsenal of weapons. You are a survivor; that means you can only fight with what you find, and what you find has limited durability. In the demo, the paddle I scavenged actually broke in the middle of a zombie encounter. It literally snapped in two as I cracked the skull of one of the zombies. Zombies were swarming and, with only my fists, I decided it was better to just run. This is just one example of how Dead Island makes an authentic survival experience....Aside from weapon limitations, Dead Island offers an RPG element in the game. Players can choose from four main characters - each filling the typical archetype roles of “tank”, “rogue”, “damage dealer”, “healer”. While it’s not as blatant, the roles do exist and certain characters are meant for running into the middle of a zombie pack and taking the brunt of the damage. Once you choose your character, there are three skill trees to upgrade as you level up by doing quests and killing zombies.

These skills include things like increased damage, faster health regeneration, and things of that sort. This RPG element makes you feel like you really are the character. Your not just choosing a character and running through a level. Rather, you are choosing a character and molding that person to fit your style of gameplay. ...Speaking of gameplay, this isn’t the type of game where you just swing wildly at your enemies. Dead Islands’ zombies have specifically target-able areas. With limited ammo and weapon durability, you better aim carefully...The encounters in Dead Island are just as chaotic as you’d expect. With that being said, Dead Island doesn’t litter the map with zombies. In an open world game, exploration would be annoying if you had to fight your way through every inch of the map. And trust me, there is plenty of exploration. Although it takes place on an island, the environment is huge and you can expect to explore every nook and cranny of the map. As you explore you will encounter survivors who will give you side quests to complete, rewarding you with essential supplies.

It sounds refreshing. As long as it runs well technically, I'd probably enlist.

You can certainly split up on an L4D or Killing Floor game if you want to (I've been on many a team that didn't seem interested in being around each other on a map), it just seems at odds with the co-op experience. Apparently this doesn't have friendly fire so bunching up shouldn't be too frustrating hopefully.

The big difference is going to be that you're not all on one level, but in an open world. Of course I'm not sure which is more frightening- zombies or the thought of rittchard roaming undetected in my world

And while there is no friendly fire, other players can take damage from the environment, like a propane tank or something.

Not that anyone here would blow up a teammate(s) with an exploding barrel

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Is there even an option for friendly fire? I sad if not. Having to be careful not to hurt friends while frantically shooting and throwing stuff at zombies is thrilling, can't wait to do it in a game as well.

Is there even an option for friendly fire? I sad if not. Having to be careful not to hurt friends while frantically shooting and throwing stuff at zombies is thrilling, can't wait to do it in a game as well.

no direct friendly fire.

oh, and I added you as a friend ibdoomed. figured it was easy to pick out the guy who spent 111 hours in DE:HR

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No lie -- I had a dream Friday night in which my older brother and I were using axes to hack our way through a series of connected rooms full of zombies in some strange building. We finally reached his wife and kids who were safely in a last room. We all embraced each other in relief. And dammit I wanted to know what happened next but I had to use the bathroom in the Real World.

I don't know whether the dream's related to The Walking Dead Season 2 or this game. I'm still unwilling to commit to this game without a demo or some first hand impressions from my brethren here. I'll be busy with Space Marine this week, though I will be eagerly monitoring this thread.

Dead Island is great. Go buy it. There. That was easy. Oh- You want to know why? Well I'll tell you. Dead Island is a very good open world zombie survival game featuring a robust weapon crafting system and first person melee combat. It’s positively chock full of bloody undead chunks.

As a single player experience it's fun (really fun), but not amazing. There are some minor flaws that keep it from becoming something truly special. As a co-op experience, Dead Island overcomes these flaws, nay, it strait up curb stomps them into a soupy red goo. Dead Island is one of the best co-op titles of the year....I'd have to say the game reminds me of Borderlands mixed with your bloodiest zombie wet dreams and then infused with a healthy dose of first person, panicked, flailing, melee combat. There’s also hints of Fallout 3 in the game as well, both in terms of the RPG elements and the ridiculously gory violence. Top that all off with some gratuitous potty mouths and you’ve got a recipe for one Dead Island and a very Mature rating....But as is the nature of open world games and zombie apocalypses, there are scattered NPC’s who want you to do stuff for them. These missions have a lot of variety. You’ll be fixing a truck, looking for lost items or people, turning on this, making that, all while hacking, slashing, stomping, and bashing your way through the zombie hordes. There is even the occasional escort mission, and unlike every other escort mission ever, these don’t suck....You won’t see guns until the second Act, and then it’s up to you if you want to use them. We simply found the melee weapons more that satisfying. Perhaps forcing players to get up close and personal would seem to make death more frequent, and at times, it is. Thankfully Dead Island does a good job of making you cautious of dying without really penalizing you for getting killed. You’ll lose 10% of your cash and respawn nearby after a meager five second time penalty. You can also revive your teammates if you have a spare Med Kit....On a technical level it’s easy to see that Deep Silver paid a lot of attention to co-op. Story progress, experience, dropping-in and out all behave as you’d expect. Dead Island has been tailored for the discerning co-op gamer. We’re planning on posting a full FAQ on Dead Island co-op soon, but rest assured, there’s very few negative aspects in terms of co-op play....Money is shared. If I pick up $12 bucks, everyone gets $12 bucks. XP scales to your level, but it’s shared on a scale. If I kill a zombie, you’ll get some XP if you assisted in some way. Anything you place in your inventory will go back to your game when the session is over.

Contrary to what the game tells you on a load screen, any player can join any game. If you’re level 1 and want to jump into a level 30 character’s game, you can. You won’t earn any story progress or mission rewards. You will get a ridiculous amount of XP if you can take down a zombie. If you are a level 30 character and want to hop into your friend’s new game, you can. You’ll get 1 XP from killing zombies, but you will get rewards for completing missions, even though you already completed them! The best thing is that the rewards scale.

The game lobby and party system are incredibly smooth. If you’re playing solo you’ll be notified whenever an available game with similar story progress is open. Simply press left on the d-pad and you will hop into the host’s game. Since you both have the same story progress, everything that happens will occur in your game as well.

Other people can enter your game at any time. If you don’t want any help you can set everything to private. When the host leaves the game you can continue on your own. The game even lets you create a new copy of your character at a matching level of a friend’s game and then you can save that in a separate slot. Like I said, there’s a lot of attention to technical detail.

It might seem like I pasted in the whole thing but it's 3 pages, and I just highlighted what seemed like important, mostly appealing details to know.

These are issues that should be blatantly apparent to any halfway decent tester, so I have to wonder if the game was rushed to shelves to take advantage of the heat generated by February's well-received teaser trailer.

There's so much content in Dead Island, it's a real shame the work wasn't done to take it from functional to fun. Some of it works: There's a beautiful world to explore here, some genuinely neat ideas and cool weapons. But the end product too closely mirrors its antagonists: Shambling forward, but only just.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the experience though. Dead Island is a deeply flawed game, but it's also clearly a low-budget game and one that has interesting ideas, often under-served by the bargain-basement code. Finding the diamonds in the rough demands a lot of patience, and enough investment in the base joys of zombie slaughter to tolerate the laundry list of flaws.

I suspect this will be one of those games that will be justifiably mocked by the majority for its many flaws but embraced by a forgiving minority, and passionately defended for its underdog status. Neither response will be entirely wrong. Much like gnawing on human flesh, Dead Island's clumsy horror-action role-player is the definition of an acquired taste.

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Since Co-Optimus was so rave about the co-op but lukewarm on the single player, I wonder if the reviewers are focusing more on the latter since they're not going to find anyone to play co-op with right now. Actually, I don't know how Co-Optimus found anyone to play with unless it was the devs themselves.

There's review builds out all over the place. Most likely they played with other cooptimus writers, or other writers across the industry. It's common when early review builds are given with multiplayer.

Thankfully, I'm getting this only for the co-op.

I'm glad to hear that a the most recent version allows you to jump into anyone's game, regardless of level. Other reviews talked about limitations with chapters and levels.

Brad Shoemaker from Giantbomb said it was a lot like Fallout 3 with zombies. That was all I needed to hear to preorder it today.

After watching the string of recent Quick Looks in which Brad Shoemaker fumbles around blindly and is unable to answer even basic questions about the game he's supposed to be showing off, he might as well equate Dead Island to a can of asparagus wrapped in tort reform. It doesn't mean a thing.

Brad Shoemaker from Giantbomb said it was a lot like Fallout 3 with zombies. That was all I needed to hear to preorder it today.

After watching the string of recent Quick Looks in which Brad Shoemaker fumbles around blindly and is unable to answer even basic questions about the game he's supposed to be showing off, he might as well equate Dead Island to a can of asparagus wrapped in tort reform. It doesn't mean a thing.

-Autistic Angel

Brad isn't really good at playing and talking at the same time. I've followed Brad as a reviewer for a long time and he tends to like the same things in games that I do. He is one of the few reviews I'll buy a game based on his opinion even if it isn't well informed. YMMV of course.

I'm so interested in this game but I'm debating whether or not it'll be worth it for me since MP may not be as feasible with the pings and lack of local servers. Good thing it won't be unlocking til Sept 9 for my part of the world, so I have some time to wait for reviews before deciding if it's a buy or not.

played for about a half hour but I need to try and get a netbook up and running so I'm not sure how much more I will get in tonight. Initial impressions are the game feels... clunky. already had one CTD, and I'm going to have to dig around on getting vsync working because screen tearing is pretty bad.

I picked the Asian chick to start since she specializes in 'sharp weapons', but the game has referred to her as him once already and the dialogue reads as if the game assumes there are other people playing co-op with you even in single player. combat is quick and deadly, with the occasional quicktime event if a zombie grabs you. graphically things looks nice when they aren't tearing while you look around. oh, and checkpoint save system.

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Played for about 2 hours and its pretty fun. I had to go into the video config file to turn on vsync and fsaa since there isn't any options in game which is common now for some reason. After that the game looked much better and I didn't notice any pop-in.

I'm playing with a controller and it works fine the aiming reticle is a little strange but it works ok. I'm using digital combat, the analog seems more versatile but is a little slow, I may change later. I really don't have a problem with the feel of the melee, it works for me and you need to time your kicks to be successful. Havent made a weapon yet but did find a bench.

I died once about 1 minute in as I went the wrong way, but I haven't died since. Ive been able to take on 4 zombies with little health loss. It is a gruesome game and some pretty bad language that I wish could be turned off. The story is silly but the world is fun to explore with plenty of things to search.

I'd have to say that overall I'm having fun. As everyone else says, the story, setting, characters, and everything is pretty much worthless. But they get a many things right as much as they get wrong.

The mostly open world is a nice touch and I'm really looking forward to trying co-op. The combat works, and is decently fun, if extremely brutal. I like the slower pace of it, even if that means there's a lot of clunky moments. Trying to fight with short melee weapons like knives gets a bit frustrating as well, but thankfully Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is back in force, as the all powerful kick maneuver with no stamina cost to use returns.

But yeah, hitting Y enables noclip mode, which is just plain stupid of them to miss.

There's also way too much bloom lighting being used, which is really annoying because you go to tropical places so that you don't have to see through a layer of smog.

Played for about 2 hours and its pretty fun. I had to go into the video config file to turn on vsync and fsaa since there isn't any options in game which is common now for some reason. After that the game looked much better and I didn't notice any pop-in.

yeah, I did that too and thing are much better. kept on getting a prompt to join other people even with the game set to single player.

there's a lot of posts on the Steam forums suggesting that maybe they accidentally released a developer/debug build of the game since there is no reason why no-clip should be tied to a key other than this not being the release version. I guess someone also went through the files in the game directory and found stuff that shouldn't be there. if that's the case I hope they can just patch it up and not make us re-download the whole thing.

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As usual, you guys are awesome. I fired it up last night before bed and got stuck at a door asking me to press R and S. Do you need to tap R and S at the right time with that moving bar? Are we aiming for the middle? Hopefully there aren't many of these doors since I suck at them.

As usual, you guys are awesome. I fired it up last night before bed and got stuck at a door asking me to press R and S. Do you need to tap R and S at the right time with that moving bar? Are we aiming for the middle? Hopefully there aren't many of these doors since I suck at them.

huh, I got that but I had to pull the mouse back and then push ti forward instead of hitting any keys, so maybe you hit R to get the bar moving and then S to stop it. I'm guessing you need to hit as close to the center as possible to do the most damage to the door.

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Anyone else felt odd playing the African american from New Orleans (the melee specialist) and spend the first 30 minutes of the game looting? Oh look, I just woke up from being drunk and no one is around. Guess I'll see what is in everyone's suitcase.

Anyone else felt odd playing the African american from New Orleans (the melee specialist) and spend the first 30 minutes of the game looting? Oh look, I just woke up from being drunk and no one is around. Guess I'll see what is in everyone's suitcase.

because he's from new orleans?

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Just remember: once a user figures out gluten noting them they're allowed to make fun of you. - Ceekay speaking in tongues.

Anyone else felt odd playing the African american from New Orleans (the melee specialist) and spend the first 30 minutes of the game looting? Oh look, I just woke up from being drunk and no one is around. Guess I'll see what is in everyone's suitcase.

because he's from new orleans?

The whole character bio about his mom being on crack, not having a dad, living like a gangsta, etc. The character is like a page out of the inappropriate stereotype handbook. I picked him just because I want to club zombies.

As usual, you guys are awesome. I fired it up last night before bed and got stuck at a door asking me to press R and S. Do you need to tap R and S at the right time with that moving bar? Are we aiming for the middle? Hopefully there aren't many of these doors since I suck at them.

huh, I got that but I had to pull the mouse back and then push ti forward instead of hitting any keys, so maybe you hit R to get the bar moving and then S to stop it. I'm guessing you need to hit as close to the center as possible to do the most damage to the door.

I figured it out, it thought I was using a controller and it meant right stick, weird. I'm past that now.

As usual, you guys are awesome. I fired it up last night before bed and got stuck at a door asking me to press R and S. Do you need to tap R and S at the right time with that moving bar? Are we aiming for the middle? Hopefully there aren't many of these doors since I suck at them.

huh, I got that but I had to pull the mouse back and then push ti forward instead of hitting any keys, so maybe you hit R to get the bar moving and then S to stop it. I'm guessing you need to hit as close to the center as possible to do the most damage to the door.

I figured it out, it thought I was using a controller and it meant right stick, weird. I'm past that now.

So how do we get together?

I'm not sure. I only got in about 45 minutes last night between looking up where to change the graphics options and trying to get my netbook functional again. I did see options to join other people's games while running around but I didn't get a chance to pop open the MP menu (if there is one, it's all kinda hazy). when digging for the graphics options info I did see plenty of posts saying MP didn't seem to be connecting correctly (with the usual 'I am connecting just fine' responses), it might have something to do with it possibly being the wrong build.

« Last Edit: September 06, 2011, 03:23:41 PM by CeeKay »

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I just read that there is a patch coming out today and it completely breaks saves. So hold up on playing.

The version uploaded to steam was the dev version of the game. I'd stop playing until the proper pc version is released.

From Green Man Gaming's Facebook:

Quote

To those wondering the earlier patch is not the 'fix' you are looking for with Dead Island. From their Facebook page "We are very sorry for any issues you may have experienced while playing the game - the correct, patched version will be made available to North American players ASAP." Posted 1 minute ago. It's very unlikely we'll see more keys before they release the full version of the game. /Rob

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